rewrite this title The iPhone 17 could miss out on a long-awaited display upgrade – here’s why Apple fans are upset

The iPhone 17 series will reportedly lack a previously rumored anti-reflective, scratch resistant coatingApparently it was taking too long to apply to the millions of iPhones Apple is buildingIn other news, the iPhone 17 series is reportedly on schedule for a September launch

One of the earliest iPhone 17 rumors suggested that the upcoming phones would have a scratch-resistant and anti-reflective display coating, but now we’re hearing that this won’t be the case after all.

It seems that the original claim may have been correct at the time, as a source “with reliable information” told MacRumors that this had been planned for the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max.

But apparently the process to apply the coating to the millions of handsets Apple is building was taking too long, so the company is said to have scrapped the idea – at least for this year.

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What MacRumors isn’t clear on is whether Apple has switched to using a simpler coating, or perhaps a nano-texture display (which can also cut down reflections and is currently in use on some iPads and Macs), or whether the screens on the iPhone 17 series won’t be any more anti-reflective than current models.

A big miss

While we’d take this claim with a pinch of salt, it certainly sounds believable since we hadn’t heard anything about this coating in a long time. And that’s a shame, because this sounded like a big upgrade for Apple’s phones.

Cutting down on reflections and glare would make the colors appear more true to life and less washed-out in bright lighting conditions, and the other feature of this coating – its scratch resistance – would obviously help keep the screen safe from damage.

So it’s no surprise that Apple fans haven’t responded well to this news, with a lengthy Reddit thread including comments like “this is such a shame”, “really falling behind”, and “I’ll probably switch to Samsung”, with those last two comments likely referring to the fact that the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra does have an anti-reflective coating.

Still, there is some good iPhone 17 news, as in a paywalled DigiTimes report (via BGR) it’s claimed that Apple has completed engineering validation testing (EVT) for at least one iPhone 17 model.

If that’s correct – and nothing changes – it should mean that Apple is currently on track to launch the iPhone 17 series in September.

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